Nov 28 2008
“Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps” by Andrea Warren
Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps by Andrea Warren is a well-written biography of Jack Mandelbaum, a boy living just inside Poland’s borders at the beginning of World War II. It is a young adult book - I would say the child reading it would need to be at least 9 or 10 - and even though it was written for that age group, it was so well-written, I still enjoyed it.
It starts out with Jack as a child in Poland, and the happy upbringing that he had. Although his grandparents were Jewish, his parents were not devout, and so Jack considered himself Polish first, and Jewish as a far, far second. When the war started, Jack was excited, like any 12-year-old boy would be, at the sight of soldiers matching and the naval ships readying to fight against Hitler. He was sure that Poland would be able to beat Hitler in a week.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it happened, and things got progressively worse for Jack, his family, and the Jews in Poland in general. He eventually ends up in the concentration camps, and he talked about the 
friends who helped him, the horrible jobs he was given, and the starvation that surrounded him. Although there are obviously a lot of bad things happening to him and everyone around him, Jack was a naturally optimistic person, and the book never got really depressing (except a little at the end).
Overall, I enjoyed it - it tended to read a little simplistically, but then again, I wasn’t the intended age group for the book, so I can’t really complain. If you are studying the Holocaust with your children, and you want a companion book for The Diary of Anne Frank, this would be the perfect complement: It is from the point of view of a boy, and it covers the concentration camps, so your children can get a more well-rounded view of what happened in that terrible atrocity.
I give Surviving Hitler 4.5 stars out of 5.
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